Five fans cool Super Overclocked GeForce GTX 680

Computex — This year's Computex show was filled with hot-clocked graphics cards. Some featured custom cooling solutions with one fan, others had two, and a few even squeezed three fans onto a single card. Gigabyte's Super Overclocked GeForce GTX 680 beat them all, though. This triple-slot beast is lined with no fewer than five fans.

Where are they? We asked the same question when Gigabyte showed us the card. Rather than being mounted on the face of the cooler, the spinners are located along the top edge.

Although the blades are small in diameter, the fans haven't been pulled from a bin of old chipset coolers. These babies are much thicker than anything I've seen bolted to a motherboard; they look like they belong in a slim server chassis. Servers aren't known for their silence, but we're told some of the fans will spin down when the card is idling.

Clock speeds and pricing haven't been finalized. The latter will surely be steep, but I've gotta admit I'm intrigued. While the cooler will probably be noisy, pulling in air from the edge might be a good idea in cases with vented side panels. The fan orientation is particularly appealing for tightly packed SLI configurations—pretty much the only SLI config possible with triple-wide cards.